Impact of six month releases (original) (raw)

Ryan Schmitt rschmitt at pobox.com
Fri Nov 3 00:21:03 UTC 2017

I have similar concerns along these lines. For example, JDK9 introduced the "one plus three back" policy for cross compilation, such that javac in JDK9 can now only target JDK6 and newer. Under the old release schedule, "one back plus three" could easily cover a decade's worth of JDKs, but now that window will shrink to approximately two years. There are similar questions around JDK deprecations: how long do my dependencies have to migrate to VarHandles and StackWalker? Three years or six months? Will we continue to have a new bytecode version with every release, or will the classfile format only be incremented as needed?

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